Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-c47g7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-24T01:50:15.463Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Ghost in the House: Women, Race, and Domesticity in South Africa1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 June 2014

Gabeba Baderoon
Gabeba Baderoon*
Affiliation:
Penn State University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

In South Africa, the house is a haunted place. Apartheid’s separate publics also required separate private lives and separate leisures in which to practice ways of living apartheid’s ideological partitions into reality. This essay analyzes the compulsive interest in black domesticity that has characterized South Africa since the colonial period and shows that domestic labor in white homes has historically shaped the entry of black women into public space in South Africa. In fact, so strong is the latter association that the Dictionary of South African English on Historical Principles reveals that in South African English the word maid denotes both “black woman” and “servant.” This conflation has generated fraught relations of domesticity, race, and subjectivity in South Africa. Contemporary art about domestic labor by Zanele Muholi and Mary Sibande engages with this history. In their art, the house is a place of silences, ghosts, and secrets. Precursors to these recent works can be found in fiction, including Sindiwe Magona’s short stories about domestic workers in her collection Living, Loving and Lying Awake at Night (1994) and Zoë Wicomb’s novel Playing in the Light (2006), in which a woman passing for white allows her mother into her house only under the pretense that she is a family servant. Muholi and Sibande have engaged the legacy of black women in white households by revisiting the ghosts of the house through performance, sculpture, and photography. Both were inspired by the intimate reality of their mothers’ experiences as domestic servants, and in both cases the artist’s body is central to the pieces, through installations based on body casts, performance, embodied memories, and the themes of haunted absences, abandonment, and longing.

Keywords

Domestic workersdomesticitymaidmadamSouth Africaapartheidslaveryintimacyperformancevisual artblack womenwhite womenraceautobiographyproductionZoë WicombPlaying in the LightHélène CixousReveries of the Wild WomanZanele MuholiMary Sibandephotographysculpturepost-apartheidghost-writinghousesubjectivity.
Type
Articles
Information
Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry , Volume 1 , Issue 2 , September 2014 , pp. 173 - 188
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2014 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

1

I thank the editors of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry for a brilliant new intellectual venue, the readers of the essay for their insightful comments, and my colleagues Rosemary Jolly and Charlotte Eubanks for inspiring and impeccable advice.

References

2 Baderoon, G., “Fanon’s Secret” in A hundred silences (Roggebaai: Kwela/Snailpress, 2006)Google Scholar, 63.

3 Fanon, Frantz, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (London: Pluto, 1986 [1952])Google Scholar, 128.

4 Press, Karen, Krotoa’s Story (Sea Point: Buchu Books, 1990)Google Scholar, 6.

5 Meid, the Afrikaans version of the word, intensifies its offensiveness when used in English, and the brutal term kaffermeid specifically licenses sexual violence. This can be seen in the testimony provided by a woman activist before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission: “When a woman refused to bow down,… then that unleashed the wrath of the torturers, because in their discourse, a woman, a black ‘meid,’ a ‘kaffirmeid’ (kaffer servant girl) had no right to have the strength to withstand their torture” (quoted in Rubio-Marín, Ruth, ed. “The Gender of Reparations: Setting the Agenda”, What Happened to the Women? Gender and Reparations for Human Rights Violations (New York: Social Science Research Council, 2007), 48–91Google Scholar, 52). I am grateful to Rosemary Jolly for alerting me to this in her work in Cultured Violence: Narrative, Social Suffering, and Engendering Human Rights in Contemporary South Africa, (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010).

6 Girl and boy are terms of insult used for black women and men of any age. They both infantilize and make age uncertain, simultaneously removing authority and the protection of childhood. Krotoa/Eva is called “a girl” in Van Riebeeck’s diaries, and this seems to refer both to her young age and to her role as a domestic servant. In J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, the subject of the Magistrate’s obsession is the “Barbarian girl”, whom he “relieve[s] of the shame of begging and install[s] her in the barracks kitchen as a scullery-maid” (1990: 31). This, however, is such a familiar trope of sexual exploitation that the soldiers in the barracks quickly comment: “From the kitchen to the Magistrate’s bed in sixteen easy steps” (1990: 31).

7 Silva, Penny, Dore, W., Mantzel, D., Muller, C., and Wright, M., A Dictionary of South African English on Historical Principles. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, in Association with the Dictionary Unit for South African English, 1996)Google Scholar, 255.

8 Distiller, Natasha and Samuelson, Meg, “‘Denying the Coloured Mother’: Race and Gender in South Africa”, L’Homme: European Review of Feminist History. 16.2 (2005): 28–46Google Scholar, 31.

9 Abrahams, Yvette, “Was Eva Raped? An Exercise in Speculative History”, Kronos: Journal of Cape History XXIII (November 1996), 3–2IGoogle Scholar, 4.

10 Distiller and Samuelson note that the governor of the Cape in 1674 described Krotoa in his obituary of her as “distasteful[ly]” “hovering between” two worlds, “like the dogs, always return[ing] to her own vomit” (quoted in Distiller and Samuelson 2005: 31).

11 Distiller, and Samuelson, , “Denying the Coloured Mother”, 31Google Scholar.

12 Abrahams, , “Was Eva Raped?”, 11Google Scholar.

13 Distiller, and Samuelson, , “Denying the Coloured Mother”, 31Google Scholar.

14 Ricoeur, Paul, On Translation (New York: Routledge, 2007)Google Scholar, 22.

15 Elbourne, Elizabeth, “Domesticity and Dispossession: British Ideologies of ‘Home’ and the Primitive at Work in the Early Nineteenth-Century Cape”, Deep Histories: Gender and Colonialism in Southern Africa, eds. Wendy Woodward, Patricia Hayes, and Gary Minkley (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002), 27–54Google Scholar, 27–28.

16 Ibid., 28.

17 Abrahams, , “Was Eva Raped?”, 3Google Scholar.

18 Distiller, and Samuelson, , “Denying the Coloured Mother”, 40Google Scholar.

19 Press, Krotoa’s Story, 6.

20 Dooling, Wayne, Slavery, Emancipation and Colonial Rule in South Africa, (Athens: Ohio University Press; Pietermaritzburg: UKZN Press, 2007)Google Scholar, 7.

21 Mason, John, Social Death and Resurrection: Slavery and Emancipation in South Africa, (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003)Google Scholar, 108.

22 Mason, , Social Death and Resurrection, 73Google Scholar.

23 Cock, Jacklyn, Maids and Madams: Domestic Workers under Apartheid, (New York: Women’s Press, 1989)Google Scholar, 4.

24 Cock, , Maids and Madams, 14Google Scholar.

25 Fish, Jennifer, Domestic Democracy: At Home in South Africa (New York and London: Routledge, 2006)Google Scholar, 81.

26 Ally, Shireen, From Servants to Workers: South African Domestic Workers and the Democratic State (Ithaca: Cornell University Press), 2011Google Scholar.

27 Ndebele, Njabulo, “Arriving Home? South Africa Beyond Transition and Reconciliation”, In the Balance: South Africans Debate Reconciliation, eds. Fanie du Toit and Erik Doxtader (Johannesburg: Jacana, 2010), 55–73Google Scholar, 58.

28 Ibid., 67.

29 Cock, , Maids and Madams, 16Google Scholar.

30 Mason, , Social Death and Resurrection, 110Google Scholar.

31 Ibid., 108.

32 Ibid., 76.

33 Dodson, Belinda, “Reconfiguring Space, Reimagining Place: Post-Apartheid Geographies of South Africa and Its Region”, Canadian Journal of African Studies 47.1 (2013): 1–8Google Scholar, 1.

34 Freud, Sigmund, “The ‘Uncanny,’” Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works. Vol 17, trans. and ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1919 [1955]), 217–256Google Scholar, 245.

35 Bystrom, Kerry and Nuttall, Sarah, “Introduction: Private Lives and Public Cultures in South Africa”, Cultural Studies 27.3 (2013): 307–332CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 307.

36 Like Agaat, Anne Landsman’s The Devil’s Chimney (1997) engages the troubled relation of land and household in the plaasroman (farm novel), explored, for instance, in J. M. Coetzee’s exemplary In the Heart of the Country (1977); the long-running Mail and Guardian comic strip “Madam and Eve” depicts the relationship between a white female employer and her black domestic worker, characterized by intimate enmity between the women and also brief moments of empathy and alliance; Zukiswa Wanner’s comic novel The Madams (Oshun, 2006) revisits the fraught meanings of domestic work from the perspective of black women who employ white maids. In the United States, popular books and films such as The Help and Lee Daniel’s The Butler have used the often-overlooked presence of domestic servants as a lens on the workings of power.

37 Magona, Sindiwe, Living, Loving and Lying Awake at Night (Cape Town: David Philip, 1991)Google Scholar.

38 Pieter Dirk Uys, 1983. Farce about Uys. http://pdu.co.za/FARCE%20%20ABOUT%20%20UYS.pdf. Accessed May 14, 2014.

39 Wicomb, Zoë, Playing in the Light (Roggebaai: Umuzi, 2006)Google Scholar.

40 Cixous, Hélène, Reveries of the Wild Woman: Primal Scenes (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2006)Google Scholar, 3.

41 Thomas, Kylie, “Zanele Muholi’s Intimate Archive: Photography and Post-Apartheid Lesbian Lives”, Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies 11.4 (2010): 421–436CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

42 McClintock, Anne, “ ‘The Very House of Difference’: Race, Gender and the Politics of South African Women’s Narrative in Poppie Nongena”, Social Text 25/26, (1990): 196–226Google Scholar, 197.

43 Goniwe, Thembinkosi, “Exhibition Preview: Desire: Ideal Narratives in Contemporary South African Art, South Africa’s Exhibition at the Venice Biennale, 4 June–27 November 2011”, African Identities 9.2 (May 2011): 247–248CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 247.

44 Zanele Muholi, telephonoic interview with author, United States, March 25, 2014.

45 Ibid.

46 Gabi Ngcobo, “It’s Work as Usual: Framing Race, Class and Gender Through a South African Lens”, AfricAvenir International (2010). http://www.africavenir.org/publications/e-dossiers/revisions/gabi-ngcobo.html. Accessed February 14, 2014.

47 Ibid.

48 Muholi, Zanele, “I Have Truly Lost a Woman I Loved”, Reclaiming the L-word: Sappho’s Daughters Out in Africa, ed. Alleyn Diesel (Cape Town: Modjaji, 2011), 11–21Google Scholar, 21.

49 Ibid., “I Have Truly Lost a Woman I Loved”, 21.

50 Woodward, Wendy, “Contradictory Tongues: Torture and the Testimony of Two Slave Women in the Eastern Cape Courts in 1833 and 1834”, Deep hiStories: Gender and Colonialism in Southern Africa, eds. Wendy Woodward, Patricia Hayes, Gary Minkley (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2002), 55–84Google Scholar, 55.

51 Matebeni, Zethu, “Intimacy, Queerness, Race”, Cultural Studies 27:3 (2013): 404–417CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 404.

52 Malatjie, Portia, “Questioning Gender: The Artwork of Mary Sibande, Zanele Muholi and Nandipha Mntambo”, Jag Ed 2011 (Johannesburg: Johannesburg Art Gallery Education, 2011), 24–27Google Scholar, 24.

53 Hlonipha Mokoena, “Anyone Can Be a Maid”, Africa Is a Country (blog), December 6, 2010. http://africasacountry.com/anybody-can-be-a-maid/. Accessed February 13, 2014.

54 Ibid.

55 Goniwe, , “Exhibition Preview”, 247Google Scholar.

56 Dodd, Alexandra, “Dressed to Thrill: the Victorian Postmodern and Counter-Archival Imaginings in the Work of Mary Sibande”, Critical Arts 24.3 (2010): 467–474CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 467.

57 Bidouzo-Coudray, Joyce, “Mary Sibande—Poking at Power Relations in Post-Apartheid South Africa”, The Guardian, January 7, 2014Google Scholar. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/07/mary-sibande-south-africa-art. Accessed January 7, 2014.